FEBRUARY 2020 PCWorld 27Intel confirmed
“Tiger Lake”as its
next CPU codename.pcworld.com/zphr), meanwhile, taps into the
energy efficiency of AMD’s new CPU and
Nvidia’s Max-Q GeForce technology to offer
the world’s first 14-inch RTX laptop. This thing
looks badass. Acer’s Swift 3 (go.pcworld.
com/3swf), meanwhile, will come with either
Intel or AMD inside.
Are the tides finally turning for AMD’s
notebook efforts? It certainly seems like it.
At the end of our chat with Ian Cutress, he
muses about the future for AMD’s
Radeon graphics cards,
because AMD
revealed the Radeon
RX 5600 XT (go.
pcworld.com/56xt)
during its keynote as well. It’s
basically a lower-clocked version
of the Radeon RX 5700 with 6GB of
memory and a $279 price tag. Look for it to
take on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 series for
PC gaming’s 1080p sweet spot when it
launches January 21. In a small roundtable
with press after the keynote, AMD CEO Lisa
Su revealed what’s next for Radeon (go.
pcworld.com/lisu): high-end Navi GPUs and
real-time ray tracing.
Intel isn’t taking the threat lying down,
naturally. It revealed an array of news at CES
2020, the most interesting being the grand
unveiling of early versions of its discrete DG1
graphics in both desktop (go.pcworld.com/
dx1e) and laptop (go.pcworld.com/d2xe)
form, based on the company’s Xe graphics
architecture. DG1 products are scheduled to
launch sometime this year.
Things were quieter on the CPU front. Intel
confirmed that “Tiger Lake” is the next CPU
codename you need to care about (see page
19), but didn’t say much beyond that, though a
Thunderbolt 4 tease quickly devolved into aDell’s G15 SE will ship with a Ryzen 4000 inside.